“Ah ha!”
The old man yelled at Andrea and me as he burst into the girl’s room at the medical testing facility where we were all quarantined for the weekend. His oversized blue scrubs made him appear even more insane than he actually was at that moment.
I rather liked my scrubs. I felt they made me look smart, perhaps like a medical student, doctor, or nurse, in any other circumstance short of the one I was currently in.
“That’s my TV! You girls stole it!” he yelled.
“We did not steal it! It’s not yours and it’s the only one with a VCR. The nurses said the girls could have it!”
“It is mine! I marked it with a piece of tape.”
The old man shuffled behind the television and pointed to a piece of clear plastic tape.
“See!”
“That doesn’t mean anything! You’re crazy, old man!”
Raised in a very religious family in Georgia, I was certainly not brought up to speak to the elderly this way, but I was desperate. I had been locked up in a four-room medical facility in Neptune, New Jersey for the weekend. There were only two televisions at the facility and the other one was a widescreen in the rec room that was consistently displaying rap videos. Adding to my misfortune was the fact that I was part of a group only there for the weekend, as opposed to the longer-term “healthy volunteers.” I was too late to get in on the board game of War going on in the eating area, and my right hand was rendered useless from the painful catheter inserted into my wrist, so the homework I had naively expected to get done stayed in my bag. Andrea, another healthy volunteer in my same study, and I had nothing else going for us that night but the possibility of watching the Gia movie again on VHS in the girls’ room. The nurses had let us have the other TV, but apparently, it was not theirs to give. The old man started pushing the TV out of our room and I yelled back at him as he hurriedly shuffled down the hall.
Andrea and I, both in our early twenties, went to tell. Much yelling and whining later, we had the TV rolled back into our room and the movie began. We were free to enjoy the rest of our night until they came to get us for our nightly pregnancy test. The pregnancy test was done to ensure the testing facility would not be responsible for any deformed babies. With Viagra trials going on right next door to the birth control ones, potential pregnancy was a huge concern. Our tests would come back negative and we would sleep for a few hours until the next morning, when the drug trial would officially begin. The trial I took part in was for a pain patch. The nurses would put the pain patch on our arm, and then draw our blood every half-hour for an entire day.
Only four females were in my trial, the rest of the participants were men, some our age, but most were older.
“At Glaxco in Philly they have individual TVs by everyone’s bed. The food is better too,” Andrea muttered.
I was the only person in our group to have never been a “healthy volunteer.” The others were career lab rats, jumping from pharmaceutical company to pharmaceutical company, hoping to land the clinical trials with the fattest checks. It was a complete underworld I had never heard of and would have completely missed if I hadn’t checked the back page of a local paper while heading out of the grocery store.
The ad boasted: “Healthy Volunteers Needed for Clinical Trials, All Ages and Sexes, $$$ Thousands of Dollars a Week!!!” I bit into it just as fast as I did my ramen dinner. I had just moved to New York a couple months before and was desperate for some fast cash.
A couple days later, I was on a train out to Neptune, New Jersey, to get a medical evaluation. If I passed the evaluation, I would officially be healthy enough to become a “healthy volunteer.” The testing room at the facility was packed with other hopeless hopefuls like me, unable or unwilling to hold down a regular job, but willing to sacrifice our entire wellbeing for a fast check. At least we apparently had our health.
After spending several hours having my blood and urine tested, and my body poked and prodded, I was put in front of a male nurse who presented me with a packet. The packet explained the procedure from there. I would be informed if I was eligible to be a healthy volunteer upon getting all the blood tests and urinalysis back. If I was eligible for the particular medical test in question, I was to call this number at 8am on this date, and if I was one of the lucky first twelve to get through, I was in! It was not unlike the radio station contests where the first caller wins.
After getting word that my stats were up to par, I waited for my time to call. At 7:59 I picked up the phone and dialed. Busy signal. I borrowed my roommate’s cell phone and put the number in both phones, rotating so there was no time lost reloading. Finally, I got through. I was in. I felt like I had won the lottery, but with the stipulation that first I had to donate my body to science.
My test was to occur over three weekends. I was to catch the train to Neptune each Friday, and return Monday morning. I was excited but cautious, hopeful my career aspirations would pay off before I became a career guinea pig, my life’s work culminating when I became one of the bodies playing football in The Bodies Exhibit at South Street Seaport. My parents would be so glad they spent all that money on private schools only for me to become a lab rat once left to my own devices.
When I arrived at the facility in Neptune for my first weekend, I was led into the clinical trial quadrant, and locked in. During all clinical trials, no one was allowed outside that space. I thought of the poor volunteers who lied when asked if they smoked, and how they coped with not being able to go outside for days at a time. I was put in blue medical scrubs and immediately led to a room to have a catheter inserted in my wrist. The other volunteers from my test were in the room as well.
“Is this your first test?” a girl asked me.
“Yep.”
“You picked a tough one.”
I didn’t know there were easy ones. A man in his 40s, with a heavy Brooklyn accent and named Philip, spoke up next. Philip went on about being a career guinea pig, supporting his family and himself this way for years. Another girl told me this was her last clinical trial.
“I just need a little more money put away, and that’s it, I’m done,” she said.
I looked around the room of human lab rats, and knew I’d never watch a Viagra commercial the same again. You know at the end of the medicine commercials, all the side effects a soothing voice calmly goes over?
“Frequent diarrhea, night sweats, sleepiness, erection lasting more than four hours, a sudden urge to gamble…”
I knew the faces of the people that actually experienced those effects. One guy in our group was going to be on American Idol. Another was saving money to go back to Trinidad. I needed money for school. I guess we all had our dreams and reasons for being there, except maybe Philip. Philip I couldn’t figure out. Maybe he already had his dreams, and let them go. Or maybe he was living his dream. He did seem to enjoy the time away from his wife, even if it was with a catheter in his arm and his blood incessantly drawn.
For a couple weeks I entertained the thought of joining their underworld. I cruised the healthy volunteer websites, read about the different clinical trials, read the reviews of the different facilities, considered the costs of flights to Texas and California versus the risk of not being selected for the trial. I had to finish college, so the high-paying trials that required you to be quarantined for weeks, and even months, at a time were out of the question. I wasn’t sure I would ever be willing to stay longer than three days. The food was good, and it was free, but other than that, there weren’t any perks. Being at the trial facility was somewhat like summer camp and somewhat like a psych ward. The incessant rap videos blaring from the common room were annoying, but I wasn’t going to question a roomful of 20-something males that were locked up for a month.
Friday we would arrive at the facility in Neptune. The first order of business would be changing out of our civilian clothing and into scrubs. I imagined it was a ritual not unlike going to jail. Then we would have the catheter put in. My catheter was inserted in a vein on top of my wrist. Each Friday I would go through a period of slight panic and question my ability to go the whole weekend with a painful needle stuck in my wrist. The discomfort was almost not worth the money, but I wasn’t about to be the loser first timer who couldn’t handle it. Even the vomit girl (as Andrea would later be referred to as by me) was staying in the game.
That night we watched movies on our little television set (an archaic piece of technology like the ones teachers used in elementary school, the box television on the rolling cart with the VCR they could never get to work right away and everyone would worry we would have to have a lesson instead and then suddenly they would get it working because the weird kid in the back knew what to do). We would get called in for dinner, hide the TV so the old man wouldn’t come take it, eat dinner and rush back to the only thing keeping us sane and distracted from the catheter, the rap videos, the Philips, and the reality that we were willing to subject our body to “phase two” drugs, essentially science experiments, for a fat check.
Early the following morning we were moved into the testing room, given the pain patch, and the day of blood drawings began. Each weekend they would rotate the arm from which they drew blood. By the third weekend, I looked like a heroin addict, cringing as a needle was inserted into my scabbed arm every half-hour to draw more blood. I realize now why they call it medical “trials.” Even into the night, after we fell asleep, they came around a few times and drew more blood. I honestly don’t really know what they were searching for in all that blood. I know they wanted to see how the patch got along topically. One week they left the patch alone, one week they put a heating pad over it (I guess to test its sticking power against heat), and one week we had to shower with it on periodically throughout the day. The sucker stayed put.
While we were all sitting in hospital beds waiting for our next blood drawing, we would listen to Philip talk about doing erectile dysfunction trials, having erections for days and being unable to do anything about it. The patch made only Andrea sick, but it was really sick. She vomited most of the first trial Saturday. I was certain she would not return the next week, but she did, to vomit in front of us even more. The facility was smart in that they gave us a small stipend each week, to ensure we would return until trial completion for the big payout. When I later saw commercials on TV for various prescription drugs, Andrea was the one to whom my mind always returned. I would think of her sitting in that bed across from me. She looked so desperate, tired, and defeated. There are reasons $3,000 checks are not easy to come by. As Andrea reeled in discomfort, Philip continued story time from his years of trials. I was a little surprised he was still in the “healthy volunteer” wing. At least he knew once all the not-quite-yet FDA approved drugs finally caused some permanent damage, he could volunteer for studies as an “unhealthy volunteer.” When we all grew bored of Philip, others told urban legends of AIDS trials in Texas that abruptly ended and everyone was paid out a large lump sum. I listened wide-eyed and terrified.
“Do you think maybe they accidentally gave all the healthy volunteers AIDS?”
“Who knows?”
No one seemed at all concerned about my biggest fear. One of these drugs could make us sick, even die. We could grow an extra toe. Our hair could fall out. We could end up murdered by loan sharks in Atlantic City after not being able to control our sudden urges to gamble. They were right. Who knows? No one knows exactly what these drugs do; that’s what the “volunteers” were there to help solve.
After the final weekend, a doctor checked me over to make sure I was still healthy. I was certain he would find something was wrong with me, that the medicine had an adverse effect on me and I would be permanently punished for my lazy earnings. The doctor took a cursory glance at me, checked my heart rate, and tried to send me on my way.
“Wait! There is a large mass in my abdomen,” I told him. “It wasn’t there before.” I had noticed the mass in my lower belly the day before. The pain patch is wreaking havoc to my insides! I stretched out on the exam table.
“It’s right here,” I said, lifting up my shirt and pushing down on the lower left portion of my abdomen. I was certain I was dying. This had to be serious. The doctor began feeling around my stomach.
“When’s the last time you had a bowel movement?” he asked.
“Uh…I don’t know…” I didn’t want to tell him there was no way I was going to let my bowels move around these other people.
“Why?” I asked, annoyed he had changed the subject.
“That’s what that is,” he said, pushing on it again.
Crap.
I didn’t ask the doctor any other questions. The nurse handed me a check for the remainder of my $3,000 and I left Neptune, and headed back to earth. My first purchase was a long sleeved shirt to hide the blatant needle marks on both my arms.
For months after the drug trial ended, I would watch TV waiting for my instant fame in the form of a pharmaceutical company commercial for a pain patch. I was planning to shout out, “That’s me!” during the “In clinical trials…” part at the end. But I never did see an ad for the pain patch. A Google search of the words “pain patch” returned articles about the FDA recalling a pain patch due to related deaths, mostly from misuse of the patch or being wrongly prescribed it. The article goes on to mention warning signs of an overdose, such as inability to think and loss of brain function. I suppose the pain patch won’t be friending me on Facebook anytime soon.
Maybe the Scientologists have it right (except for all the parts about us all being aliens and brainwashing you into giving them all your money). Aren’t we a little overmedicated? Are all these new wonder drugs curing us of something or are they just treating the side effects, and then causing us new ones? When I was in high school I convinced my mother I had ADD and needed medication. I mostly wanted ADD medication because I had heard it killed your appetite. I will totally be able to focus and fit in my skinny jeans. My mother took me to a doctor who asked me maybe five questions.
“Do you have trouble focusing in class?”
“She should sit closer to the front,” my mother would break in and say. I hoped the doctor ignored her. He did.
“Yes, I do. I can’t concentrate.”
“Homework?”
“Way hard to finish.”
“It’s prescription Speed,” the doctor told my mother as she wrote out my prescription.
I froze, hoping my mother didn’t know what Speed was. She didn’t, and just like that, I was on Adderall. I was stoked. It didn’t take long before the honeymoon ended between me and my prescription Speed. The Adderall started making me severely depressed when it wore off in the afternoons. I was then prescribed anti-depressants to counter the effects of the Adderall, and later, I was also given a small dose of Xanax when I told them I had trouble sleeping. I did the prescription roller coaster all through high school. When I went away to college I just stopped taking them all. The doctor who prescribed me all my fun pills told me that I was one of those people with a chemical imbalance and would probably have to be on anti-depressants for the rest of my life. How can you tell a 17-year-old that? Isn’t it possible it’s just high school? Don’t you remember how bad high school can be? Tom Cruise would be so proud of me...until I volunteered to assist the enemy with their drug trials.
By winter I was back waiting tables, and by spring the money was long gone. I was a full-time waitress and a full-time student, fortunately still maintaining brain function and healthy bowels. I catch the ads in the back of the paper for the sleep studies and egg donations and ponder my next move. I considered other clinical trials, checking out GlaxoSmithKline in Philadelphia, curious to see the Ritz of clinical trial facilities and the lure of personal TVs and better food…but I never went. After all, all we really have is our health.
My Dad called about the W-2s I sent him and wanted to know what the $3,000 payment from a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey is and I made something up as I continued my daily Neosporin ritual, trying to get rid of the track marks on my arm by swimsuit season.
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